The problem is that we are just shaving Leviathan when we need to start draining its lifeblood until it's too anemic to do much harm. Right now, it's the one holding the straight razor and slashing throats right and left.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

De-Worming 'Public' Health Care

I've been wondering lately if maybe I've been wrong about everything all along. If you strip the parasites of power in Washington, they'll just move to state governments to carry on their mischief. (Not that there aren't plenty of the power hungry already there.) Repeat at the state level and they'll become local busybodies. Strip even local government of the power to harm you and, who knows, they might become the intrusive, "we need a committee" type at your company.

Hmmm...

As Spencer Tracy's Clarence Darrow-like character in Inherit the Wind famously said (paraphrasing): "Fanaticism and ignorance are ever busy." What he didn't mention was that the smaller their scope, the better chance you have to escape them. Leaving a company or your town is one thing. Even leaving your state is not an insuperable problem. Leaving the country is dicey at best.

Is this human nature? I don't think so; it's not that widespread. But there are enough who choose this path to make their impact far out of proportion to their numbers. The solution? Shun them. Literally. Don't trade with them; don't even feed them. Don't support parasites and, without a host, they have to die off or change their ways, at least to the extent of being more subterranean about it, which is appropriate for the black-plague fleas carried by sewer rats.

The lust to control the choices of others is at the base not only of this latest attempt to socialize medicine (their patently false concern over controlling costs to the contrary), but of every single social evil in the world today. It accounts for the amazing consistency - across a wide spectrum of seemingly unrelated issues, everything from global warming to food preferences - of 'liberals' of all stripes. Socialists, Progressives, Pragmatists, or outright Fascists, you name it they are all brothers under that very thin skin.

Whether that lust is a goal pursued for its own sake, or as a means to the end of social engineering, or whether social engineering is just a cover for seeking power as the ultimate end, we can leave to psychology (if it ever develops to to the point of being able to answer such questions). But whether cart or horse, the results are the same and it's far past time to break the axle on the transport that is taking us all to hell at rocket speed.